Photoshop Skills Development 2

This is my film poster which I have designed to harness and improve my Photoshop skills in preparation for the magazine which I have proposed to create. The film which I was creating the poster advertisement for was 'The Simpsons Movie'. Criteria which was required to be included on the poster was: an image of Homer Simpson, 'The Simpsons Movie' title, and a theatrical release date (which, in this case, was July 27th 2007). The first thing I decided to do was create the text 'The Simpsons' in the traditional trademark Simpsons font. I made the entire background yellow, which coincided with the existing black text. yellow and black being a traditional Simpsons colour scheme. I created the word 'movie' in a large font with the font style 'Impact'. I left the text the same colour as the background, adding only a black stroke effect to the text to cause it to stand out. I placed the 'Movie' layer behind the 'The Simpsons' layer of text. I proceeded to copy the 'movie' layer and shrink it to a smaller size, replacing the text with 'July 27th 2007', the release date. I found two image which I would like to use in my poster, an image of the vast majority of the Simpson's cast and an image of Homer Simpson, the show's main character with his mouth wide open. I positioned the release date by rotating and shrinking, and carefully positioned it in such a way that it created the appearance that he was eating the text. I used the Magic Wand tool to cut out the white parts of the image of all of the characters, so that when placed just in front of the background layer, the yellow background could still partially be seen.

I used the gradient tool to create a black-transparent gradient on the lower half of the poster, as the image of the characters ended suddenly. This gradient gives the impression that the characters are endless. I got two images to place in the remaining black space at the bottom of the poster.  One is of a doughnut and one is of a can of Duff beer, both of which have key connotations with the show. I positioned the doughnut layer above the layer of the release date to imply the doughnut has been left over and placed on a flat surface of some sort. I duplicated the image of a Duff beer can twice, once to place in front of the original image, and one which I can rotate and use the warp tool on to give the appearance of the can being crushed and merely thrown to the ground. The final thing I did was use the 'select' and 'gradient' tool on the south-east section of the image. The gradient was a beige-transparent gradient which I inserted to give the impression that beer was leaking from the aforementioned crushed beer can.

Overall, I am fairly happy with my image. The only criticisms which I can see are the facts that the large image of the show's characters in the background is fairly pixelated, and may be quite off-putting. The only other things I can see are located on the Homer Simpson image. His shirt is very jagged and cuts off suddenly at the bottom, and the outline of his eyeballs and his trademark two strands of hair have both been cut out during the removal of the white background via the magic wand tool.